Banker, Enron witness found dead in London park: BBC--12:08pm - By Aude LagorceLONDON (MarketWatch) -- A banker who worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland and was questioned by the FBI about the Enron fraud case has been found dead in an East London park, the BBC reported. The body has been identified as banker Neil Couldbeck, the BBC said, citing unnamed sources. According to the report, police are keeping an open mind about whether the death was linked to the Enron investigation, which involved RBS subsidiary NatWest. Three British former NatWest employees are being extradited to the U.S. on Thursday to face fraud charges.

Banker, Enron witness found dead in London park: BBC--12:08pm - By Aude LagorceLONDON (MarketWatch) -- A banker who worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland and was questioned by the FBI about the Enron fraud case has been found dead in an East London park, the BBC reported. The body has been identified as banker Neil Couldbeck, the BBC said, citing unnamed sources. According to the report, police are keeping an open mind about whether the death was linked to the Enron investigation, which involved RBS subsidiary NatWest. Three British former NatWest employees are being extradited to the U.S. on Thursday to face fraud charges.

New documents about the identity of 1880s serial killer Jack The Ripper are to be revealed at the re-launch of Scotland Yard's Crime Museum.
The paperwork has been donated by relatives of an officer involved in the original investigation.

The museum, which has been re-vamped and modernised, features exhibits from famous cases dating back to 1875.

Admission to the exhibition is by invitation only and attracts officers, crime experts and lawyers.

At the re-launch, a relative of Ch Insp Donald Swanson, the senior investigating officer of the Jack the Ripper case, will be handing over the paperwork which provides a name suspected to be the murderer.

Medical training:

The serial killer is believed to have killed five prostitutes in Whitechapel, east London, in 1888 but he was never caught.
His victims were either strangled or stabbed, with some of the bodies badly mutilated and even having organs removed. Some believed he had medical training.

The pseudonym Jack the Ripper was coined from a letter sent to a London news agency at the time of the murders, supposedly from the killer himself, but which police later dismissed as a hoax.

Countless articles, books, plays, films and musicals are based on the unsolved murder mystery, among them 2001's From Hell, starring Johnny Depp.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell's 2002 book Portrait Of A Killer set out to solve the killings using modern investigative techniques.
She concluded that artist Walter Sickert was the real Jack the Ripper but other Ripper experts dismissed the findings.

Suspect fled:

Also among the names mooted was Francis Tumblety who, according to a 1995 book, was arrested shortly after the last killing but escaped and fled to America.

Another theory is that more than one person was responsible for the killings.
The Crime Museum, stored at Scotland Yard, contains amongst other items death masks, casts of necks disfigured by rope burns and a collection of nooses hanging from a gallows.
New exhibits have been added for relaunched museum.

In a pretext of fighting against terror, it is awful that something like Iraq took place and it is disgusting to watch this going on. It is [not] surprising the lack of more vigorous international condemnation of this absurd...

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In quotes: Lebanon reactionIsrael has imposed a military blockade on Lebanon and launched a series of missile strikes and cross-border raids in response to the capture of two soldiers by militant group Hezbollah.

Key international and regional powers have been responding to the escalating conflict.

US PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH

My attitude is this. There are a group of terrorists who want to stop the advance of peace. And those of us who are peace-loving must work together to help the agents of peace - Israel, President Abbas, and others - to achieve their objective.

Israel has the right to defend herself. [But] whatever Israel does should not weaken the government in Lebanon. We have been working very hard through the UN and partners to strengthen democracy in Lebanon.

Syria must be held to account. President Assad needs to show some leadership towards peace.

ANGELA MERKEL, GERMAN CHANCELLOR

We call on the powers in the region to seek to bring about a de-escalation of the situation. We cannot confuse cause and effect. The starting point is the capture of the Israeli soldiers.

It is important that the government in Lebanon, which is on a peaceful path, should be strengthened, but it must be made clear that the capture [of the soldiers] cannot be tolerated. The attacks did not start from the Israeli side, but from Hezbollah's side.

RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT STATEMENT

One cannot justify the continued destruction by Israel of the civilian infrastructure in Lebanon and in Palestinian territory, involving the disproportionate use of force in which the civilian population suffers.

We firmly reaffirm support for Lebanon's sovereignty and territorial integrity. All forms of terrorism are completely unacceptable. All sides involved in the current events should take rapid measures to stop the region sliding into open conflict.

AMIR PERETZ, ISRAELI DEFENCE MINISTER

We will not allow Hezbollah to return to the positions it occupied along the border before the soldiers were abducted. Only the Lebanese army should operate in this area and deploy forces. If the Lebanese government does not deploy its armed forces as a sovereign government should, we will not allow Hezbollah forces to move again onto the other side of the border.

We will no longer put up with a terrorist organisation threatening residents in northern Israel with the support of a sovereign government.

PHILIPPE DOUSTE-BLAZY, FRENCH FOREIGN MINISTER

We obviously condemn this disproportionate act of war, which moreover has two consequences. The first is that it forces anyone who wants to enter Lebanon from now on to go either by sea or via Syria. The second consequence is that it risks plunging Lebanon back into the worst years of the war.

Today there is a risk of a very dangerous spiral of violence which could destabilise the entire region.

Funny, in the Bible, they talk about a man who's believed worldwide to be dead and who will "come back" to life. It's just a funny thought I had. Cause I realised that this man is not dead yet. Not that it would improve things...

The arrest comes nearly 10 years after the 6-year-old girl was found strangled and beaten to death in the basement of her home on the day after Christmas, in a case that shocked the country and that has remained unsolved.

The Associated Press, citing U.S. law enforcement officials, reported that a man was arrested in Thailand in connection with the slaying. Federal officials familiar with the case told the AP on condition of anonymity that the man was being held in Bangkok on unrelated sex charges.

JonBenet Ramsey, a child beauty queen, was found murdered in the basement of her family's upscale Boulder, Colo., home the day after Christmas, 1996.

Her mother, Patsy Ramsey, first found a handwritten ransom note on the back staircase of the home. It demanded $118,000 â€” the exact amount the little girl's father, John Ramsey had received as a corporate bonus â€” if the family wanted to see JonBenet again. Eight hours later, Patsy Ramsey found her badly beaten daughter's body in the basement.

From the beginning, the focus of suspicion was directed squarely at her father, a software millionaire, and his wife, a former beauty queen.

The Ramseys refused to take a lie-detector test and would only agree to be interviewed by police together.

Yet the Ramseys were steadfast in defending their innocence.

"Let me assure you, I did not kill JonBenet," Patsy Ramsey said then.

The Ramseys offered a reward of $100,000 to the person who captured their daughter's killer. They also wrote a memoir, "The Death of Innocence" and filed libel suits against several news outlets. Three years after the murder, investigators officially cleared the Ramseys.

"Our family name has been destroyed," John Ramsey said. "We want the killer of our daughter found."

But never-ending speculation in the tabloid press, and numerous books, continued to feed the nation's interest.

"It is our hope that this arrest will bring some closure to the Ramsey family after a 10-year ordeal," Haddon said today. "We respect the legal process and will have no further comment about the case or the evidence until that process is concluded."

John Prescott heaped yet more embarrassment on Tony Blair yesterday after a Labour MP claimed that he had described President George W Bush as "a cowboy" whose policy on the Middle East was "crap".
The row rapidly reached the White House, where Mr Bush's spokesman tried to brush off the insult and insisted that America's "special relationship" with Britain remained intact.

Mr Prescott's apparent outburst came to light when Harry Cohen, Labour MP for Leyton and Wanstead, gave an account of a private meeting between the Deputy Prime Minister and Muslim and other MPs last Tuesday.
Mr Cohen told The Independent: "He said he only gave support to the war on Iraq because they were promised the road map. But he said the Bush administration had been crap on that. We all laughed and he said to an official, 'Don't minute that.' We also had a laugh when he said old Bush is just a cowboy with his Stetson on. "But then he said [referring to his own gift of a Stetson from the American billionaire Philip Anschutz], 'I can hardly talk about that can I?' " ...............

I want to thank ya'll. I did have a good day, spent time with friends, had some great BBQ which probably wasn't good for the BP and cholesteral levels. We'll worry about that next month at my annual physical with blood work and when my doctor starts singing 'ram it, ram it, ram it, ram it up the poop chute'. Other than that I finally got that 50 something revelation I'd been looking for, that is retirement is right around the corner only 7 years 363 days 16 hours and 14 minutes away.

Last edited by ZardozII on Thu Aug 24, 2006 4:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

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